Twisted Insurrection is a standalone game based on a heavily modified Tiberian Sun engine. The game features a completely new in-depth
storyline which puts you in an alternate timeline where the Brotherhood of Nod were victorious during the first Tiberian War rather than GDI. Do you have what it takes to drag the shattered Global Defense Initiative out of ruin? Or will you crush all who oppose the will of Kane and his Inner Circle? The choice is yours commander.

I think it was a combination of many factors, from just not being directed for more visual design and atmosphere (something CNC3 lacks pretty badly) to budget constraints to time constraints and all kinds of things under the rainbow. CNC3 was more-so meant to be a game and that was succeeded pretty well. Audio/visual-wise, the story, atmosphere, etc, are pretty lacking because that's simply not the kind of game they were trying to make. They wanted to make an E-Sport, clearly took heavy inspiration from StarCraft: Brood War, and that worked really well in their favor, but they had to cut a lot of corners to accomplish that goal.

Greg Black has said they prefered the world of TD over TS, and so went in that direction. Which I agree with, TD was way cooler, but continuity-wise it made little sense. I see very, very little SC influence too, mores the pity.

I went back and played Tiberian Sun recently (hadn't done that for some time), and to my surprise there was very little Tiberium flora in it, I had grown used to how beautifully grim Twisted Insurrection is, I did not expect to see vast, empty deserts in the Tiberian Sun campaign, but unfortunately that was what I got.

That is not to say that there is no Tiberium flora in Tib Sun, the missions Dogma Day Afternoon and Seeds of Destruction from the Firestorm expansion are perfect examples of that, in fact, I feel that they may have been a pretty big inspiration for the Twisted Insurrection devs when they created the defiled, yet beautiful world of TI.

In any case, the conclusion I reached is that I had forgotten how... barren... vanilla Tiberium Sun was, it's no wonder that the devs of C&C 3 followed that trend, when they looked at that game, at that world, all they saw was an empty desert that needed to be embellished with the Blue Zones, fortunately for us, the TI devs saw something more, they focused more on the world depicted in those missions I mentioned above.

There's a lot of effort added into every area in TI. The tile, any objects on that tile, and making sure it meshes with surrounding tiles makes for a difficult mapping process.

After revisiting TS, I noticed how lackluster a lot of their maps are. Large swaths of land are devoid of details, especially compared to the level of detail in TI maps.

It's still possible to make a bleak, apocalyptic world without everything being a barren desert. And even if it's a barren desert, it can still use the minor touches to make the terrain look more atmospheric.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of the appropriately named mission Sea of Sand in TI, that map is basically a giant desert, but there's so much more to it than just that, the usage of overgrown Veinholes, and Tiberium that is aggressively spreading, makes it so that the map is constantly changing, it's pretty cool to watch the ruined city be consumed by this alien organism, kind of illustrates the spread of Tiberium across the planet, and then when you make your approach towards the Globotech facility, you're attacked by the Mantis, who have made their nests in the canyons, you're not only invading Globotech's territory, but also the territory of the local fauna.

It's these two simple details that have made that desert map really stand out and be memorable.

It would have been more expensive to develop and also much more intensive on computers at the time without carefully produced assets and optimization.

So EA decided "Tiberium changed again and now everything is a nice easy desert LOL". *******. Remember that they filled Generals with an incredible number of needless draw calls (some models used bits from something like 20 different shared textures) that cause all sorts of performance issues.